Short-form screencasts where I show a quick tip (usually in Cinema 4D) that you’ll likely find useful. It’s worth noting that most (if not all) of these videos have closed captions available in English. If you would like to help me translate one of these tips to your language, please email [email protected].
This tip examines a technique that can be used to control where MoGraph clones appear; you can add a Shader Effector, and then give it a texture tag to gain precise control over where the clones appear.
In this video we look at an approach using two example scenes. The first is a simple sphere with cubes as clones; the second is a globe with small cones as population markers.
This tip looks at a scenario where you may want to influence the ending position of a dynamically animated object.
The video walks us through the process where we might allows a few objects to fall, and then come to a rest; in this case we want them to rest facing a specific direction.
My last tip on the knife tool caused one of my viewers to bring about an interesting question.
How would you cut a line that is perfectly parallel to a group of selected polygons?
The answer to this actually lies in one of my previous tips on workplanes. Using workplanes and the knife tool, we can indeed create a perfectly parallel cut. See the video below for an explanation on how this is done.
The Knife tool in Cinema 4D does not leave much to be desired. It’s got a few different modes, and a lot of options to slice your geometry or add points. one such feature is not immediately intuitive (but is well documented), and might be useful to you. There is an ability to lock the knife tool’s position and numerically enter a value in the Attribute Manager. Check out the accompanying video to see how this works.
This tip focuses on three different techniques to move one object to another when using Cinema 4D.
See the short screencast for a demo of everything I mentioned above.
Cinema 4D has a slice option on the cylinder primitive. In this video we will see how to use that with a Bool object to create a cutaway effect.
The effect is achieved by animating the slice’s From and To properties. By animating one or both of these, you can create a slice that grows out of nothing and rotates around a central point. The video below will show you how to leverage this in order to create a cutaway effect on a turbo-charger model.
This tip shows an odd method of object control. It demonstrates how Cinema 4D allows you to navigate the scene using any light or object as your camera.
I first stumbled across this option when (if memory serves me correctly) my 3D mentor and former boss showed me a similar option in E.I.A.S. back in the year 2001. This was before Cinema 4D was the Motion Graphics star-child that it is today and if you’ll believe it; before Cinema 4D had the option of selecting and manipulating multiple objects simultaneously. It’s an old feature that has very little glitz and glamour but perhaps this tip will be useful to a few of you folks out there.
In this tip we take a look at color bleed from Global Illumination, and how to control it.
Cinema 4D offers a few different controls for controlling GI, and one of them is in every material. The Illumination tab houses a pair of simple values that allow you to accentuate or subdue the GI color bleed without affecting the overall brightness of the effect.
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Sometimes you need to make modifications to every identical side of a radial object. The Array object is great for repeating things in a simple circle, and this video shows how you can use it to get greater control over modeling radial things.
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This video is a really simple tip showing how to use the Current State to Object command in Cinema 4D when dealing with interpolated splines. Enjoy! Read More
We start this tip by looking at a simple animation of a flower growing/blooming; nothing too amazing. It’s the subject of the video and we take a look at how we can drive its animation timeline using MoGraph and a couple effectors.
The Extrude, Sweep, and Lathe are very useful objects in any 3D program. Cinema 4D lends itself very well to traditional designers, mainly due to the fact that it effortlessly imports Bezier splines from Illustrator. So, we can use splines drawn in Cinema 4D or in another program to Extrude or Sweep; but what happens when we need more control over the details of the generated object? Read More